Thursday, October 16, 2008

I Was Asked an Interesting Question Yesterday...

A good friend of mine at work, who is an as-yet undecided voter who doesn't like Obama or McCain, and would like to see the option of "undecided" on the ballot, asked me one heck of a question yesterday, and it came out of nowhere and caught me off-guard.

He asked "you could go back in time and change one American political event or decision, what would it be?"

He brought up things like Robert Kennedy's assassination, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a few other events that you generally learn about in History class as examples. I also mulled over a few choices that I considered, such as...

- Telling Nixon's cronies not to break into the Watergate Hotel.
- Not allowing a handful of Mississippi delegates to abandon Reagan for Ford at the 1976 GOP Convention.
- Made the Presidential term limit part of the original 10 Amendments of the Bill of Rights.

However, we changed the subject, and after 10 minutes, I hit him with my real answer.

- I would have stopped America from jumping off the Gold Standard.

This answer blew him away, as I don't think he expected me to go that route, and he had to agree that this was a significant point. As he said, "we would definitely have a strong dollar and a solid, stable economy."

What do you think? What singular event would you change...if you could?

4 comments:

Cargosquid said...

You only have a strong dollar if you have enough gold. We don't have enough. Other countries were buying up the gold supplies faster than we were.

While there are good reasons to be on the gold standard, it was not the perfect solution. We had booms and busts then, also.

Phil Chroniger said...

We did, but generally speaking, we had a bit more stability in our long-term rise. We can't go back to the gold standard NOW, because you're right...we don't have enough gold.

Now, we just print more money and devalue the dollar when we've got economic problems.

Anonymous said...

Anyone who claims to be "undecided" after a year-long Presidential campaign must have just awakened from a coma.

For those who just woke up, here's the summary:

McCain blew his chance of winning the election by picking a lying vindictive idiot for a running mate and the Bush NEOCON Republicans are still running the economy into the ground while bailing out their fat cat pals on Wall Street.

Obama's message has not changed. All he has said is that he will not be like Bush, at that is clearly good enough for the American People to give him a double digit lead and a probable landslide victory.

All that is in question at this point is what Michelle will wear to the inauguration ball and how many Congressional seats the Donkey Party will have gained after the final counts are tallied.

Phil Chroniger said...

Well, he's not so much "undecided" as he is "unhappy" with both candidates. That's what makes him undecided.